Irreversibility and loving: The spiritual direction of sacrifice into theophanic personhood (Merleau-Ponty, Scheler, & Corbin)

The main point of my thesis is (1) to call attention to the danger of pushing the reversibility of the flesh into an ethics of the body along the lines of what seems its preconfiguration of reciprocity; and (2) to recover not only the original spirit of the phenomenology of perception at stake in such a danger, but to explore a way that is faithful to the latter and restorative of the possibility of responsivity across limits---perhaps ultimately moving towards a phenomenologically adept responsibility that reconfigures the modern forces that would all but stamp such out such that this way can be livable. This work seeks to trace the movement of the reversibility theme across those two descriptive moments by doing phenomenology, rather than, say, to "make a strong case for this or that," as is akin to the morass of quandaries within and about the "history of philosophy."; To briefly summarize, then, the thesis begins by visiting the phenomenology of perception as worked through by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and specifically the reversibility thesis in its early and later developments.; We push beyond this negative component into a positive register within Max Scheler's ethos of the person (i.e., a non-formal ethics of personalism). Our concern, consequently, becomes that of an initiatory experience within a religious tradition, and specifically that which most radically preserves and recovers what is lost to the ultra-violence implicated by the ethics of the body: becoming who one is in and through interpersonal loving.; In the exemplarity of Theophanic Personhood and the ontology of suffering exemplified in and through the act of sacrifice, the condition for responsivity across limits otherwise destroyed shines forth, namely, the spiritual direction of the person. We find that in and through the sacrificial moment of Grace, not only does one's condition of responsivity get sustained and the destructive injunction of reciprocity get cancelled out. In the willingness to embrace the most terrible of sacrifices disclosed in the smile often found upon the face of the sacrificed at the moment of death, one who offers one's vitality for spirit provides a glance into an orientation most dynamically attuned to a beatific orientation and thus a divine responsibility that consists in theophanic personhood. Albeit modestly within this thesis taken alone, I seek to help light a way through the spiritual exile that lies at the furthest reaches of modern ethical investitures such as reciprocity precisely in and through a phenomenological description at the apex of which sits the dilating, beneficent purview of one's initiatory and beatific experience and vision. An absolute that becomes ever more radically unique rather than ethically universal, an ascended sensing of one's own-most vocation that is a non-formal "good-in-itself-for-me" rather than a formal "good-in-itself-for-all," the spiritual direction of person conscribes an ethos that requires a spiritual hermeneutics (ta'wil or a return to the source behind a textual fount of one's tradition). For in its most generative density--- usually most resolute within experiences which most radically challenge one's limits (i.e. transgressive or liminal experience if not violence)---one's ordo amoris and specifically the heart receives nothing but an image of that which forever remains uncreated: the structure of reality, or, better, the form and essence of the Godhead.; Alas, it is in suchlike receiving known as theophany that we then trace with Henry Corbin and esoteric Islam in ta'wil and the liminal experience of Ibn 'Arabi, as there exist few documented waypoints into initiatory experience and radical embraces of Abrahamic tradition as dynamic and revelatory as the remembrance of the person living in and through the subtle flesh embodied by the "People of the Book" to which Corbin's life's work is devoted. In the reversibility between heaven and earth generated in the Imaginal Realm (alam al...